[Misc] Shackleton’s ship The Endurance found

[bhafc99]

Interesting to go back on this IG account and follow the quest over recent weeks: https://www.instagram.com/jamesblakefilm/?hl=en

I’d been avidly following a couple of the expedition’s IG accounts for the past few weeks, and had started to assume they weren’t going to find anything as it was getting close to the end of the trip, so seeing this morning was just amazing.

 

[Rabeen]

Incredible pictures and footage and the timing couldn’t have been sweeter for me personally as I had ‘been’ Ernest Shackleton in a visit to our Year 4 children at our school yesterday.

My father is a retired merchant navy captain and I had his chronometer and sextant as part of the ‘visit’ and the children went on to ask Ernest questions about his life and death as well as being interviewed for possible positions on the 1914 expedition.

To share the news of the discovery of Endurance this morning was wonderfully serendipitous and as others have said, a great news story compared to those of recent days.

 

[birthofanorange]

The whole thing has been amazing, and it's quite poignant that the Endurance was found on the 100th anniversary of Shackleton's funeral.

 

[Acker79]

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[Mr Putdown]

My understanding was that it's not just the cold itself, but also the fact that there are no trees anywhere close by and therefore no microbes that have evolved to eat wood. (I guess if any had accidentally evolved they'd have starved to death long before the wreck appeared)

On initial reading that sounds completely logical until you consider that trees are just land based plants and that cellulose, lignin and to a lesser extent hemicelluloses, are also present in most sea plant life. Surely the fact that photosynthesis isn’t a thing at 3km would be the actual reason why there’s no plant eating microbes attacking the wreck?

Having said that, I’m sure the tree theory will win out on the internet, it’s a better story.